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PEROT CHAMPIONED UNORTHODOX WAR ON DRUGS
by Michael Isikoff, Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 10, 1992
reprinted without permission
DALLAS--When police officers complained a few years ago that they were not
properly equipped to fight Dallas's burgeoning drug trade, a prominent
local citizen named Ross Perot offered a solution: Bring in helicopters
with special infrared detectors to swoop over residential neighborhoods and
identify houses harboring narcotics.
When the officers questioned whether such tactics would be constitutional,
Perot had a quick rejoinder. "He suggested that maybe a civil war needs to
be declared," said Monica Smith, president of the Texas Police Association,
who arranged meetings between Perot and local police officers here in the
spring of 1988.
Since he was appointed by Gov. Bill Clements to chair the Texas War on
Drugs Committee 13 years ago, Perot has been among this state's most
outspoken champions of aggressive and sometimes unorthodox law enforcement.
He spearheaded a campaign to stiffen dramatically the state's laws against
drug crimes in the early 1980s, offered to help the U.S. Customs Service by
financing private commandos to interdict smugglers and engineered a 1988
campaign by Dallas's police association to weaken a civilian police review
board set up to investigate complaints of police brutality.
Perot's efforts have won him plaudits from many law enforcement officers
and large segments of the electorate in this law-and-order state. Some
anti-drug experts have hailed his crusade against drugs as a model that
inspired similar movements in other states as well as Nancy Reagan's "Just
Say No" campaign in the mid-1980s.
But Perot's critics say his efforts had virtually no demonstrable impact on
the level of drug activity in the state and, in their view, were narrowly
focused on imposing draconian prison sentences without any increases in
funding for prisons or drug treatment programs. Some minority leaders and
civil liberties groups are more critical, arguing that in his anti-crime
activities, Perot has displayed a penchant for inflammatory rhetoric and
simplistic solutions that raise questions about how he would handle crime
and drug problems on a national scale if he were elected president.
"From a civil liberties standpoint, he scares me--he sounds almost
fascist," said Joe Cook, regional Dallas director of the Texas Civil
Liberties Union. "His attitude seems to be that constitutional rights are
expendable in the name of whatever the objective is at the moment. It is an
end justifies the means mentality."
As Perot has come under increased scrutiny in recent months, he has
complained that some remarks on drug and law enforcement issues that have
been attributed to him were misunderstood or fabricated. He has, for
example, denied that he ever suggested, as he was widely quoted as saying,
that minority neighborhoods should be "cordoned off" so that police SWAT
teams could conduct house-to-house searches.
Those comments, purportedly made during off-the-record meetings with Dallas
police officers and newspaper editorial boards, provoked a storm of
criticism from black and Hispanic leaders here after they were reported in
1988. Although he did not object to the remarks attributed to him at the
--MORE--(33%)
time, Perot recently has suggested that Laura Miller, columnist for the
now-defunct Dallas Times-Herald who first reported the comments, had
engaged in "flights of fantasy" and questioned her professionalism.
Yet other journalists have said they recall Perot saying the same thing.
James Ragland, a former city hall reporter with the Dallas Morning News now
with the Washington Post, recalls being at a meeting with Dallas police
officers at which Perot suggested the police "ought to just go in there
[high-crime neighborhoods], cordon off the whole area, going block by
block, looking for guns and drugs."
"When somebody asked, 'Doesn't that present a constitutional question?' he
said, 'Look, I'm sure 95 percent of the people who live there would support
this,' " Ragland said.
Perot's critics say such comments are not out of character with other
rhetoric, often confusing, that he has employed. In recent interviews,
Perot has repeatedly said that cleaning up the nation's drug problems
"won't be pretty" without explaining what he had in mind. In an Oct. 25,
1989, appearance on the "Today" show, Perot compared the drug war to
"chemical warfare on the streets of our country" and then briefly outlined
his proposed solution.
"You can simply declare civil war, and the drug dealer is the enemy," said
Perot, elaborating on the idea he had first made to the police officers the
year before. "At this point, there ain't no bail. You go to POW camp.
You can deal with this problem in straight military terms. . . . We don't
have to have military troops do all this, but we can apply the rules of
war."
One window into Perot's attitude toward crime was the answers he gave in
pretrial questioning when he was called for jury duty in 1988 in the
capital murder trial of a 27-year-old defendant accused of bludgeoning a
man to death during a robbery in his home.
Perot expressed his strong support for the death penalty, and said he would
not give any weight to psychiatric testimony on grounds that it is "just
close to faith healing, as far as I'm concerned," according to a transcript
of his comments found in Dallas County court records here.
Perot also complained that the criminal justice system spends too much time
"looking after the criminals" instead of "law-abiding citizens." He said
that a person "breaking into your house, you know, trying to steal enough
to support a dope habit kills you, he is going to get a whole lot more
attention than my family does."
Perot was struck from the jury by defense lawyers.
So far in his unannounced presidential campaign, Perot has offered no
specific proposals for attacking the country's crime problems. Tom Luce,
chairman of the Perot Petition Committee and chief lawyer for Perot, said
he was not aware of Perot's "civil war" analogy and declined to speculate
on what measures Perot had in mind.
But Luce dismissed any suggestions that a Perot presidency would not
respect civil liberties or constitutional rights. "Ross Perot is a man who
. . . knows the terms of the Constitution," Luce said. "I'd look at the
man's track record. . . . This is a man who has operated within the public
arena."
Perot's involvement in criminal justice issues began in 1979 when he was
still basking in the publicity surrounding the commando-style rescue of two
employees of his company, Electronic Data Systems, who were being held
captive in Iran.
Clements, the state's newly elected Republican governor, appointed him to
head his 17-member "Texans' War on Drugs" task force and Perot threw
himself into the issue. "He basically turned over the business . . . and
spent the next year absolutely buried in drug issues--why we had a drug
problem, the pharmacology of drugs . . . who was in jail," said Rick
Salwen, a former lawyer for EDS who served as Perot's chief researcher and
legal adviser on the state anti-drug effort.
According to Salwen and many of his former associates, Perot turned the
anti-drug effort into a personal crusade. He spent millions of dollars of
his funds to fly in national drug abuse experts, and organized community
action groups to spread the anti-drug message among the state's youth.
Joe Lodge, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent who was hired by
Perot as a consultant, said the Texas campaign is "recognized as one of the
most ambitious, successful grass-roots efforts to fight drugs that any
state has ever done . . . He put his checkbook where his mouth was."
But it was also denounced for what some critics charged were excesses that
fed an "anti-drug hysteria" in the state. Perot focused much of his
efforts on stamping out use of marijuana, branding it a dangerous "gateway"
drug. Pamphlets distributed by the committee urged parents to listen in on
their children's telephone conversations and search their rooms for any
signs of drugs. One critic dubbed his war on drugs panel "the Reefer
Madness Committee."
Perot's efforts also produced a sweeping legislative package to toughen the
state's drug laws, including a mandatory 15-year prison term for dealing, a
forfeiture law to seize financial assets of dealers and a prohibition on
"head shops" that sold drug paraphernalia.
The package, along with a companion Clements bill to allow wiretapping and
electronic surveillance, passed the Texas Legislature with wide popular
support in 1981. But some lawmakers questioned whether Perot's proposals
were anything more than short-term solutions.
In pushing the legislative package, Perot and "the war on drugs people
thought that if you just put the law on the books that will stop it," said
Terrel Smith, a former Republican representative from Austin who chaired a
special legislative subcommittee set up to handle the package and raised
questions about parts of it at the time. "There was no effort to increase
the money for prisons, for police, for parole or probation officers. . . ."
The upshot, Smith said, has been precisely what he feared at the time: the
Texas prison population has grown by 44 percent over the past decade,
reaching a record 49,608 last year with an estimated four-fifths of the
inmates incarcerated for drugs or drug-related crimes, said Charles Brown,
spokesman for the Texas Department of Corrections.
Smith said the state has been forced to "let out murderers and rapists" to
make room for the steady influx of drug criminals.
Another part of Perot's program was prodding private companies to institute
drug-testing programs, a move that has been strongly resisted by labor
unions and civil liberties groups. Perot helped pave the way by
instituting a rigorous urinalysis-testing program at EDS. Starting in
1984, testing was mandated for all job applicants, company security
personnel and senior managers, including Mort Meyerson, the company's
president.
Perot's campaign to eradicate drugs also took him in unorthodox directions.
In 1981, he paid $40,000 to Richard J. Meadows, an ex-Green Beret commando,
and assigned him to work with the U.S. Customs Service to help interdict
drug smugglers. Meadows's activities included conducting a secret
surveillance trip of drug-smuggling islands in the Caribbean that
ultimately led to one of Perot's more unusual proposals: an offer, outlined
in a March 11, 1981, U.S. Customs Service memorandum, to purchase a
Caribbean island in which Perot would deploy his team of undercover
commandos to develop intelligence on smuggling aircraft.
Perot's involvement in the drug issue faded by 1983 and the Texas
government eventually took over many of the activities Perot was funding.
But Perot plunged back into the criminal justice arena in 1988 with his
highly publicized involvement in a debate over the future of Dallas's
police citizens review board.
In the winter of that year, the review board had become a lightning rod for
racial tensions in the city. The board had been set up the year before
following numerous allegations of brutality by the Dallas police force,
including a spree of shootings of black and Hispanic citizens by police
officers.
But after three police officers were killed in the first few months of
1988, the predominantly white police association began its campaign to
abolish the panel. Association President Smith recalls that after the
slayings, Perot called and volunteered his help.
With the police planning a referendum that would abolish the board, Perot
paid $100,000 for a survey to assess community attitudes on the issue.
More importantly, he and Luce began private negotiations with Richard
Knight, the city manager, that led to city legislation that restructured
the board and stripped it of much of its authority to subpoena witnesses or
independently investigate allegations of brutality.
Luce said the "compromise" averted a later referendum that would have
eliminated it entirely. But black and Hispanic leaders were outraged at
Perot's intervention.
"He went to one side and made up his mind and that was it," said Domingo
Garcia, a Dallas City Council member who co-chaired a group that had led
the drive to create the review board the year before. "I don't think he
has any conception of crime or the social ills of the inner city."
In the midst of the controversy, Perot did meet with black and Hispanic
leaders and pledged to fight racism on the police force. "He told us that
if anybody on the police force was racist, he would take them on," recalled
Adelfa B. Callejo, a lawyer who set up the meeting between Perot and
Hispanic leaders. "It was like he was saying, 'If you're bad boys I'm
going to withhold your money.' It was very simplistic."
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